Surfers feel seen after writer slams hit Netflix series for “using Judaism as a hood ornament”

Only a surfer knows the feeling.

Surfers have long been one of the most flagrantly abused subcultures in all of Hollywood. From the Beach Blanket Bingo films of old to the Point Break redux to Chasing Mavericks to Escape from Los Angeles to In God’s Hands, surfing and surf culture are routinely and vigorously cheapened, morphed into something hollow and silly and unrecognizable to the brave men and women who have centered their lives around this Sport of Kings.

Trunks worn under wetsuits, boards carried wax side in, high-performance shortboards paddled out into utterly flat seas.

Well, in a turn no one saw coming, a writer for The Hollywood Reporter has slammed the hit Netflix show Nobody Wants This, which follows the “unexpected relationship between an unconventional American rabbi and a irascible agnostic woman.”

It has been embraced by all-corners except one Steven Zeitchik who declared it’s “using Judaism as a hood ornament.”

Zeitchik begins by sharing how wrong depictions of Judaism in film and television once made him feel “Points for trying; let’s move on,” the bungling in Nobody Wants This is simply too much. He tells of how Tu B’Shvat, a sort of ecological awareness day, was mistaken for Tisha B’av, which commemorates the many disasters in Jewish history, primarily the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, likening it to the show Black-ish confusing Martin Luther King and Martin Luther, declaring, “when you don’t seem to be that interested in what the icons mean, everything starts to feel like a gesture.

He goes into all the characters and how none act actually Jewish. How all the interactions are shallow and unbelievable. How both signifier and signified are done wrong and lazily wrong.

“I found myself mentally asking again and again watching this season,” Zeitchik asks at the end, “why would a TV show go out of its way to focus on a religion in which it has such evidently little interest?”

Adam Brody, who plays the unconventional American Rabbi, also played surf goober Seth Cohen in The O.C.

Only a surfer knows the feeling.